Analogical Arguments

In 2016, the state of North Carolina enacted House Bill 2 (HB2) to impede the choices of trans folk regarding the usage of sex-segregated public facilities. Shortly thereafter, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced a federal lawsuit to prevent enforcement of the statute. In her speech, she drew parallels between HB2 and the racial segregation of spaces authorized by Jim Crow laws. By comparing similarly situated social movements, Lynch highlighted the injustices of state-sanctioned surveillance of bodies judged to be out of their proper place. Some welcomed the explicit invocation of an analogical relationship between the policing of trans bodies and people of color, but others resisted it for various political reasons. This chapter engages the ethics and appropriateness of analogical arguments in public discourse about civil rights. First, we review the forms and functions of analogical reasoning to clarify that analogical reasoning involves the explicit articulation of similar relationships between two or more things, not the complete collapsing of one into the other(s). Second, we explore how civil rights analogies call upon different memories of past civil rights struggles as a source of comparison. And, finally, we apply these principles to Lynch’s speech as well as some reactions to it.